The Fifty Year Lie

The frail 72 year old woman was placed on the right side of the table that was at the head of the room an hour after the anniversary party had begun. Her fit 72 year old husband sat beside her while an empty chair stood between him and the woman seated to his left. Some of the guests were wondering why she was at the head table with the married couple, but didn't want to cause any problems on the occasion of the couple's fiftieth wedding anniversary so didn't ask. A slide show of their fifty years together had been running in a continuous loop while everyone had mingled and ate the finger foods provided.

When everyone was settled, the husband pulled a remote for the projector out of his pocket and turned it off. He removed a second remote and turned on the second projector beside the first. It began with a picture of the couple in their wedding attire smiling grandly for the camera. The next picture showed the bride still in her wedding gown bent over with the back of her dress thrown up and a man not her husband standing close behind her. The graphic parts of the picture had been blurred out, but everyone knew he was fucking her. What followed were the scenes from the married couple's life together with pictures of the same man as the one in the second picture following each significant occurrence in a similar situation with the wife. The birth of their first born, a son, showed only the child and his mother followed by a picture with the second man holding the child. Pictures for the next two children were the same. The husband sat there and did nothing as his wife started to cry when someone had turned her to see the screen.

When the slide show had ended, the husband stood, folded the chair he had been sitting in, laid it on the floor beside his wife's wheelchair, and went to change the canister on the projector. When he re-started the projector, he went and sat in the empty chair beside the other woman at the table. They grasped each other's hand, his left and her right, and placed them on the table in view of the guests.

The first picture was of the husband and the other woman in an embrace. The pictures progressed showing how intimate the new couple had been. The picture of the two of them smiling for the camera while the woman held a newborn, a daughter, brought gasps from the people gathered for the party. The husband stood and restrained a young man who had stridden to the front of the room, the firstborn son. A picture of the new couple with another newborn, a son, followed the one of the girl. Ever occurrence in the married couple's life together was mirrored by one in the new couple's lives. When an enlarged document with the word divorce appeared on the screen, the wife gasped and began to convulse in her wheelchair. The husband just sat when the chair went over on its side from the seizure the wife was having. She was still by the time her niece, a registered nurse and the wife's sister's daughter, reached her. The niece checked the woman to see if she had a pulse and was breathing, but shook her head no when she stood and ran to her father, the husband at the head of the table.

The man seen fucking the wife had risen to leave when the first picture of him had shown on the screen, but a couple of the husband's nephews had returned him to his seat. The husband took a document from the young attractive blonde who had walked to the head of the table and tore it into pieces which he dropped on his now dead wife's body. The young woman went to the second man and in a loud voice asked him if he was so and so. When he answered in the affirmative, in the same loud voice declared he had been served as another enlarged document appeared on the screen. The highlighted portions showed he was being sued for "Alienation of Affections" and payment for the care of his children for eighteen years, their college educations, and their medical bills for twenty two years plus forty nine years interest for the son, forty eight years interest on the middle child, and forty six years interest on the youngest child. The total was ten and a half million dollars. He grabbed his chest and fell to the floor. He was pronounced dead at the hospital when the EMT's delivered him there ten minutes later. The legal document had a provision that attached the lawsuit to the man's estate if he died before the outcome had been determined.

The new couple, their children, and their spouses walked out of the banquet hall through the confusion the events of the afternoon had caused. The new couple was legally married the next day at the county courthouse and six months later, after selling the house the married couple, whom everyone had thought had the perfect marriage and after getting two million from the dead man's estate, moved to Tempe, Arizona. They never contacted any of the people they had left behind again and built new lives together in their new home town. The new couple grew old together and died within two months of each other. Ironically, the new wife passed first at ninety and the husband at ninety two.

The payback the husband had wrought on his cheating wife and her longtime lover was still being talked about twenty years later in the town he had fled. The second man's widow had to move away from the scandal it had caused. All the bastard children the woman had borne also moved away for the same reason. The man they thought was their father ignored them from that day forward and they became bitter and angry toward him. Only he knows when he discovered the affair and why he waited fifty years to do something about it. He never disclosed those details to anyone, not even the new wife, and took them to his grave.

The End